Run any Helm Chart as a service

In LocalOps environments, so far you can deploy any code from Github repos as a service. Since last week you can also deploy any publicly available docker image as a service. From now, you can also run any publicly available Helm chart as a service and use it in other services of the environment as dependency.

This allows your team to run practically any piece of containerized software as dependency for the applications you deploy using LocalOps.

For example, say your LocalOps environment is hosted in your AWS account and your app needs a Postgres database.

To do this, you can either

1. create a production-ready RDS database in the same AWS account using LocalOps ops.json

2. Or you can deploy Postgresql Helm chart as a service within the same environment, to run Postgres within the cluster.

Option b makes your app more portable across cloud environments, as everything would run within the Kubernetes cluster. And you can re-use your LocalOps environment / EKS cluster's compute to run Postgres instead of spinning up a brand new RDS cluster. This can be a huge savings considering that managed RDS clusters are super expensive even for basic config.

While creating a service, just pick the Source to be “Helm chart”. And provide Helm chart repo and Helm chart name.

To deploy, just trigger a manual deployment from top right and specify a version. To pass configuration to the helm chart, add the YAML config in Helm values field while creating or updating a service. Any edit has to be followed by a deployment to make them reflect.

To use chart’s services, refer to its service alias. Just like any service in LocalOps environment, we’d generate a service alias for the overall Helm chart service. This string can be used to represent Internal DNS name of the corresponding service running within the Kubernetes cluster.

Say your NodeJS service running within the LocalOps environment needs to use Postgres database that is installed via its Helm chart. Just add a secret like below in NodeJS service > Secrets section:

DB_HOST=$postgres_chart_svc_alias/service/postgresql

Let us dissect this.

1. DB_HOST is the secret’s key and it will be passed as such as environment variable to your NodeJS code.

2. $postgres_chart_svc_alias is the alias of Helm chart service. You can find this service overview section. 

3. /service is a static text we require you to add

4. postgresql is the name of the service that came with the helm chart. For different charts, it would have a different name. You can refer to your chart’s documentation on the service you want to use.

Now if you want to install other charts that uses Postgresql chart, you would use the same string but in a different configuration block. 

To use Postgresql service from another chart, say Temporal. In Temporal service’s Values yaml configuration, pass the following:

database:
  host: {{ hosts “$postgres_chart_svc_alias/service/postgresql” }}

You will use the same service alias string but inside a Helm Values YAML block as above. We support go-templates style expressions within the values.yaml for you to insert such dynamic values. Here, the hosts helper function will bring the internal dns name of the Postgres service running within the Postgres helm chart. 

Learn more from our docs. 

Get started for free:

With LocalOps, you can deploy your services on your cloud or your customers cloud account with no DevOps effort at all. Just connect the cloud account and your GIthub repos to start deploying. 

Sign up for free at https://console.localops.co/signup. Or schedule a quick demo at https://go.localops.co/tour